“... own previous lack of poetry. Most readers had found Cantos LII-LXXI hard going: in large part it took the form of transcriptions from de Mailla’s 18th-century Histoire générale de la Chine and the writings of John Adams, the head of a great Confucian American dynasty. What awaited them now was a reviving cocktail of ...”

“... hellfire – ‘yikes’, as Nomi says when this choice confronts her. Tash, who likes sex and John Lennon and string bikini underwear, is clearly hell-bound, despite her little sister’s fervent prayers on her behalf. Nomi too has a Dionysian streak, but her every hedonistic impulse is accompanied by the sharpening of diabolic knives. Nomi’s East ...”

“... First published in France in 1817, the princess’s prison journal was translated into English by John Wilson Croker in 1823. Croker noted that several passages are obscure, and one or two contradictory: there are frequent repetitions, and a general want of arrangement. All these, which would be defects in a regular history, increase the value of this ...”

“... such as Bede in England and Snorri Sturluson in Iceland: it destroyed the gods’ temples or took them over, cut down the holy oaks and replaced them with crosses, and turned the gentry into patrons of churches and collectors of tithes. These campaigns had clear targets. The guerrilla warfare against people who put out food for the Good Folk, or who ...”

“... we do. And he caught fifty terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the fifty terrorists, and he took fifty men and he dipped fifty bullets in pigs’ blood – you heard that, right? He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had ...”

“... assured pastiches which his father transcribed in the Notenbuch. In January 1762, Leopold took Wolfgang, who was about to turn six, and Nannerl, who was 11, to Munich and then Vienna, where he showed them off to municipal bigwigs and royalty, often in exchange for large sums of cash. These extended tours, usually taken without his mother, Anna ...”

“... dispatched by the infant RAF in 1919 to eliminate the ‘mad mullah’ in British Somaliland took their orders directly from London. But their best efforts, a local British army commander subsequently recorded, left the mullah’s supporters ‘cheerful, utterly defiant, and grossly slanderous about my parentage’. The US strategic bombing campaign in ...”

“... in trying to find the killer question that would somehow lead to Sturgeon’s resignation. They took evidence in the morning and took to social media in the afternoon. No one has come out of it well: not the committee members, or the obfuscating civil servants, or Salmond, who refused to apologise for his ...”

“... even briefly became an improbable object of adulation in the Sunni Arab world). But though he took pride in Hizbullah’s performance on the battlefield, he was chastened by the ferocity of Israel’s bombardment, and acknowledged that his movement’s cross-border hostage-taking operation had offered Israel a pretext to destroy large parts of Lebanon, a ...”

“... rising prices ‘to run faster to stay in the same place’, many men or their wives and children took up additional employments to increase the family income, especially the making of consumer goods: the new or enlarged manufactures such as stockings, nails, pins, starch, soap and beer are themselves evidence of a large home demand. The author examines the ...”

“... done to their mother too. Their only real protection was the mythic and tequila-breathing Uncle John, who always knew what to say, crying out ‘this situation calls for enchiladas’ whenever things really disintegrated. He had a better handle on such situations than the Catholic Church. In a story called ‘Silence’, he snatches up Mamie’s Bible and ...”

“... and his intrepid spirit:All was utter blackness; but Alee, who had left all his garments above, took me by the hand, and led me in a stooping posture some way amidst broken pots, sharp stones, and heaps of rubbish, that sunk under us at every step; then placing me on my face, at a particularly narrow part of the gallery, he assumed a similar snake-like ...”

“... the author has the least notion that they were fighting anything but a just and honourable war. John Terraine’s book is much more ambitious in scope, embracing the submarine aspects of both world wars and giving a general view of the whole struggle in which they were a part; it is intended for the general reader; and it is written for the most part in a ...”

“... mechanism for coping with surplus fertility? The ancient and long-successful answer, suggests John Boswell, is abandonment: handing your child over to The Kindness of Strangers. What Boswell starts from is some well-known stories, those of Oedipus, of Romulus and Remus, of Paris, Perdita, or Moses in the bulrushes. The child cannot or must not be kept but ...”

“... it suffers from. Much has been written on the same subject; best-known among recent works is John Prebble’s The Highland Clearances. Craig is concerned not so much with the Clearances in themselves as with the sort of memories of them that have lingered among later generations. He is from Aberdeen, and has no Gaelic beyond what he picks up by the ...”